PRACTICE RANDOM KINDNESS AND SENSELESS ACTS OF BEAUTY

 It's a crisp winter day in San Francisco. A woman in a red
 Honda, Christmas presents piled in the back, drives up to the
 Bay Bridge tollbooth.  "I'm paying for myself, and for the six
 cars behind me," she says with a smile, handing over seven
 commuter tickets.  One after another, the next six drivers
 arrive at the tollbooth, dollars in hand, only to be told,
 "Some lady up ahead already paid your fare.  Have a nice day."

 The woman in the Honda, it turned out, had read something on
 an index card taped to a friend's refrigerator: "Practice
 random kindness and senseless acts of beauty."  The phrase
 seemed to leap out at her, and she copied it down.

 Judy Foreman spotted the same phrase spray-painted on a
 warehouse wall a hundred miles from her home.  When it
 stayed on her mind for days, she gave up and drove all
 the way back to copy it down.  "I thought it was incredibly
 beautiful," she said explaning why she's taken to writing it
 at the bottom of all her letters, "like a message from above."

 Her husband, Frank, liked the phrase so much that he put it
 up on the wall for his seventh graders, one of whom was the
 daughter of a local columnist.  The columnist put it in the
 paper, admitting that though she liked it, she didn't know
 where it came from [sic] or what it really meant.

 Two days later, she heard from Anne Herbert.  Tall, blonde,
 and forty, Anne lives in Marin, one of the country's ten
 richest counties, where she house-sits, takes odd-jobs, and
 gets by.  It was in a Sausalito restaurant that Ms. Herbert
 jotted the phrase down on a paper place mat, after turning it
 around in her mind for days.
 "That's wonderful!" a man sitting nearby said, and copied it
 down carefully on his own placemat.
 "Here's the idea," Herbert says. "anything you think
 there should be more of, do it randomly."

 Her own fantasies include:
 (1) breaking into depressing-looking schools to paint classrooms,
 (2) leaving hot meals on kitchen tables in poor parts of town,
 (3) slipping money into a proud old woman's purse.

 Says Ms. Herbert, "kindness can build on itself as much as
 violence can."  Now the phrase is spreading, on bumper stickers,
 on walls, at the bottom of letters and business cards.  And as
 it spreads, so does a vision of guerrilla goodness.

 In Portland, Oregon, a man might plunk a coin into a stranger's
 meter just in time.  In Patterson, New Jersey, a dozen people
 with pails and mops and tulip bulbs might descend on a run-down
 house and clean it from top to bottom while the frail elderly
 owners look on, dazed and smiling.  In Chicago, a teenage boy
 may be shoveling off the driveway when the impulse strikes.
 What the hell, nobody's looking, he thinks, and shovels the
 neighbor's driveway, too.

 It's positive anarchy, disorder, a sweet disturbance.
 A woman in Boston writes "Merry Christmas!" to the tellers
 on the back of her checks.  A man in St. Louis, whose car
 has just been rear-ended by a young woman, waves her away,
 saying, "It's a scratch. Don't Worry."

 Senseless acts of beauty spread: A man plants daffodils along
 the roadway, his shirt billowing in the breeze from passing
 cars.  In Seattle, a man appoints himself a one man vigilante
 sanitation service and roams the concrete hills collecting
 litter in a supermarket cart.  In Atlanta, a man scrubs graffiti
 from a green park bench.

 They say you can't smile without cheering yourself up a little
 --likewise, you can't commit a random act of kindeness without
 feeling as if your own troubles have been lightened if only
 because the world has become a slightly better place.  And you
 can't be a recipient without feeling a shock, a pleasant jolt.

 If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found your
 bridge fare paid, who knows what you might have been inspired
 to do for someone else later?  Wave someone on in the
 intersection?  Smile at a tired clerk?  Or something larger,
 greater?  Like all revolutions, guerrilla goodness begins
 slowly, with a single act.

 Let it be yours.